Choice vs Depth

Modern man seeks to preserve his choices, but thereby dooms himself to never leaving the shore.

A journey inherently has a direction and a route.  To seek to preserve the freedom to go in any direction, is to seek to stagnate.

A lifetime is finite, and therefore one must commit and move.  To preserve choice is to want to remain young, the epidemic of modernity.

To not marry, to not have a child, to not set down one's anchor and be part of a community, to not become active for an issue close to one's heart ... is to live free, to live "in the moment" but perhaps not to live at all.

A direction and a chosen path is scary.  What if one is wrong.  But to not move because of that fear is a greater wrong.

Move.  If the path is wrong, so be it, you will find out.  A tragic life is infinitely better than a life of un-made choices.

All paths can only be wrong if you have lost your heart and your inner compass.

A ghazal by Ghalib, or a novel by Maugham, or a story by Poe or Chekhov, cannot be imagined without a heart that felt immense grief and pain and expressed it.  But that pain was due to a commitment.

There was a time when commitment was the safer choice.  But times have changed.  Today, freedom is the safer and the more cowardly choice.

Freedom for the sake of freedom is the fear of making a meaningful choice.

To continue to browse what is available is to be a casual human being.  At some point, you must say Yes to a path presented to you, and then walk on it till you fail or you succeed.  

If to not start is not to live, to leave things halfway is to live a half-hearted life.

As Tennyson said (and this poem of his, his magnum opus perhaps, was in grief over the passing of a dear friend):

I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods:

I envy not the beast that takes
His license in the field of time,
Unfetter'd by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;

Nor, what may count itself as blest,
The heart that never plighted troth
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
Nor any want-begotten rest.

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.